Referring to anything dating from the second half of the nineteenth century through the middle of the twentieth as Russian becomes difficult.

Boundaries have always been determined by war. And for the Russian monarchy and the Communists that followed, there was a never ending shifting back and forth of boarders. It’s difficult to completely obfuscate local cultures that the Russians were attempting to obliterate and for that very reason, the term Russian avant garde is stretched to the limit of its possible meaning.

Encompassing all manner of artistic creation and numerous stylistic innovations – anything from Cubism to Futurism – the Russian avant garde can mean almost anything. And considering the fact that one of its most well known figures, Vassily Kandinsky, was also associated with any number of other movements works to cement the unwieldy definition of the term.

Even the dates during which this supposed movement occurred are malleable – perhaps 1850 is a proper beginning. Perhaps not. But after the revolution in 1917, there was a decade and a half explosion of forward looking work.

Kasimir Malevich warrants his own entry in this history – and will receive one shortly. But his early affiliations with aforementioned movements and subsequently jettisoning each points to this post war era as an important one in the history of modern art movements in the twentieth century. His work with geometric shapes can be seen as an extension of Mondrian’s work. But it can also be set within a political context, denying the State sanctioned styles of the time for his own vision.

Of course, any number of other artists from the time period might be figured in roughly the same manner. El Lissitzky can’t be said to have birthed the style in which he worked most frequently. But the move towards a disassociation with representational art is an important one. Lissitzky’s name isn’t the best known from this crop of artists, but his work is easily on par with that of Malevich and in some ways a bit more accessible in that the uniformity of color creates some aura of familiarity with each of his works. Of course, some might figure the restraint of his palette to be reductive for no good reason, but it was a response to the flowery and colorful work of others then plying the depths of the newly emerging concept of abstraction.

With no real boundaries – date or place – the Russian avant garde can’t properly be figured as an inclusive whole. Rather, the works associated with the movement and those artists it sought to counteract comprise its totality.